Entertainment – Cody Gough (dot com)https://codygough.com
Validating my existence one obscure blog post at a timeSat, 27 Oct 2018 19:45:52 +0000en
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10 Worst Episodes of Star Trek: The Original Serieshttps://codygough.com/2018/10/29/10-worst-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/
https://codygough.com/2018/10/29/10-worst-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/#commentsMon, 29 Oct 2018 13:00:18 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1701I didn’t watch every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series with my wife just so I could write a bunch of lists about it. We watched the show for fun. We’d watch an episode to decompress and relax after a stressful day dealing with work or healthcare or family or whatever.

We found that this was not always a good idea.

There’s bad television, and then there’s awful television. Unwatchable television. Television that makes you wonder: how did this get made? How is the writer of this episode still employed? Why hasn’t anyone burned/obliterated every existing copy of this in order to save the human race from it?

If you’re watching Star Trek to relax, then skip these episodes. After reading this list, please feel free to cleanse your palate with my previous list of the 10 Most Entertaining Episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Whatever you do, DO NOT watch the episodes on this list if you’re looking for “good” Star Trek. You’ve been warned.

Cody — This episode bridges the gap between the lists of best and worst episodes because it firmly belongs in the “it’s so bad, it’s good” category. You know in cheesy black and white sci-fi movies, you can tell they literally put someone’s pet gerbil on a low-budget model of a city with cardboard buildings? Think Plan 9 from Outer Space. That’s this episode.

It is actually a Halloween special. I’m not kidding.

This is the only holiday special of any kind in the history of any Star Trek series. In it, the crew beams down to a planet for no discernible reason, immediately encounters three witches extremely reminiscent of the ones in Macbeth, and ends up in a castle with a giant black cat walking around the hallways. And by “giant cat,” I mean “literally a regular black cat walking around a low-budget set made to look like the catacombs of a castle.” This episode belongs in the “bad” category because it makes absolutely no sense. But this, THIS is campiness in all its glory. There are few, if any, episodes with a more ridiculous premise. But this episode delivers on several other outrageous elements, such as highlights from the series’ usual casual racism against Vulcans (when a perplexed Spock asks, “’Trick or treat,’ captain?” Kirk replies with a dry “Yes, Mister Spock. You’d be a natural.” Because in the future, it’s hilarious to infer that non-humans with pointy ears are Satan! LOL!), some great puns among great quotes, and witches who speak in rhymes. If you take anything in the Star Trek universe seriously, then you will hate this episode. But it’s worth checking out if you want to experience 60s Halloween television in its purest form.

Casey — If there were a book titled Surprising Mistakes that can be Made in the Depths of Uncharted Space, that book should include the following:

KIRK: They tried to tap our conscious mind.
SPOCK: And they missed. They reached basically only the subconscious.

Whoops.

So as I mentioned in a previous post, Star Trek really digs the Freudian stuff—psychoanalysis was actually pretty big in the 60s—and a lot of episodes involve somehow projecting or materializing the characters’ unconscious (or “subconscious”) desires and fears, most of them pretty generic mass culture tropes. This episode constitutes the clunkiest iteration of the your-deepest-darkest-fantasies-made-real plotline. The mystery—which, for the crew as for the audience, is “what the F$%# is going on?!”—is solved when Spock realizes, after narrowly escaping from a fluffy black Mancoon, that the deepest of all unconscious fears, the really primordial terror inscribed into human DNA for millennia, is the fear of… cats.

KIRK: Why a cat?

Reasonable question.

SPOCK: Racial memories. The cat is the most ruthless, most terrifying of animals, as far back as the saber-toothed tiger.

Ah.

In addition to the dubious psychoanalytic-racial theory worthy of McCoy and thus subpar at best for Spock, this episode offers three really unforgettable images. As in, you try to forget them and just can’t.

The first is the aforementioned regular-sized black cat filmed in close-up against what is very obviously a gothic dollhouse. One hopes they spent the money they saved filming this sequence on something useful, like dental work for Scotty, or fixing Chekov’s hair.

The second is the woman (SURPRISE! The black cat was actually a catty dark-haired woman disguised as a cat!) who repeatedly transforms, in an I Dream of Genie poof of pink glitter and xylophone arpeggios, into… the same woman with different clothes and hair. Here is how the scriptwriters describe this transformation:

SYLVIA: You find me beautiful? But I can be many women. (now she’s blonde teen jail-bait) You like what you see. (a platinum blonde in a loose cat-suit) or do you prefer me as I was?

Wince. However, the most cringingly awkward moment, the moment when you’re really just embarrassed for the studio, the actors, and everyone involved, is not the revelation that Kirk has a “blonde teen jail-bait” fantasy (in all fairness to the Captain, the actress continues to look about 38 years old), but rather the moment of truth when the real appearance of the villains is revealed. Bereft of their poorly functioning, misfiring fantasy-stealing-and-projecting devices, bereft of their magic orbs and amulets (a little out of place in a sci-fi series), the assailants assume at last their true form: fuzzy blue beaded bird muppet lobsters.

Photo Source: The A.V. Club

One can only wonder what this image was expected to evoke or recall in the minds of its TV audience.

Cody — There’s a scene in The Godfather Part II where Al Pacino’s character learns about an abortion, and you can see rage building up inside him as if he’s about to murder literally everyone in the world. Just by looking at him, you can feel the raw fury, as powerful as a nuclear explosion, inside him. This is basically how The Omega Glory made me feel. Every time I didn’t think this episode could get any worse, it did. There is so much going on in this episode, it’s almost impossible to completely explain.

First, the good: I will say in this episode’s defense that, at the very least, a lot of time is spent emphasizing the Federation’s Prime Directive of non-interference. Decent world-building there. Moreover, the overall plot involves a somewhat interesting Federation officer they encounter whose motives are clear and whose story arc is scientifically coherent enough to pass as decent science fiction.

But the bad outweighs the good. Let’s start with the premise. Two factions on this planet are feuding: Kohms and Yangs. Yangs are barbarians. Yangs are also all Asian. And they’re named YANGS. I get that the 60s was a different time, but are you telling me there’s no way Star Trek could have been LESS subtly racist than by giving a generic name to a tribe of Asian barbarians? Oh, but it gets worse. There’s a stupid scene in which Captain Kirk is captured and locked away in a cell with a Yang. They agree to a truce after a fight scene, after which Kirk is almost immediately double-crossed, proving that none of the stupid locals on that primitive planet can be trusted! But then. THEN. The ending happens.

Stop reading now if you want to experience the ending yourself, because it is so utterly incomprehensible that I could barely believe it was actually happening. My jaw actually dropped for the duration of the last 10 minutes of this episode. I don’t believe I’ve witnessed a television moment so startlingly incongruent and forced in any show I have ever seen. It truly is the icing on the American Imperialism Cake that this episode turns into. Somehow, for some reason, hundreds of years in the future, Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise literally recites the Pledge of Allegiance. You also discover that the inhabitants of this planet literally worship the United States Constitution. I am screaming as I write this. I have broken three keyboards just trying to finish this paragraph. Casey needs to take over before this episode completely dominates this entire blog post, or somehow results in a house fire. I LITERALLY CAN’T EVEN, as the kids say. This is the Star Wars Holiday Special of all of Star Trek. Nothing in any series of this franchise comes close to how insultingly bad this was. And I’ve read that it was nearly the pilot episode of the series. That’s all I have to say, because my fist is bleeding from punching a wall. Talk to you soon.

Casey — Yeah, it was not a great episode. The religious treatment of the Constitution = highly problematic, as the news reminds us pretty much every other week. However, my memory of it mostly consists of watching Cody hyperventilate on the couch.

Cody — This episode is literally hard to look at. The senior officers of the Enterprise contract a disease that makes them age rapidly, which means they also contract several layers of makeup that God never intended to be seen in high definition. Honestly, Casey hid her eyes for a good portion of this episode. It’s absolutely hideous. There’s nothing else to say about it other than that we both hated it. As he “ages,” Doctor McCoy also speaks with an increasingly southern accent. Because as we all know, a primary symptom of getting older is that you inexplicably develop a southern accent for no reason. This episode is just the worst.

Casey — If David Lynch were to have directed an episode of Star Trek, it would be this one. It’s like Eraserhead if it were just the lizard baby, without the darkly funny parody of bourgeois courtship or the nightmare existence of an eternal and banal domesticity. Or if Dune were just the Baron’s pustules. (Which it basically is.) So disgusting. There are no plots or mysteries or side stories or even Spock quips. Just disgustingness. In HD.

Also, no one could have predicted that as Kirk aged he would also grow quite fat??? Really? Even in Shatner’s heyday one notes the nascent little paunch.

I for one am hashtag grateful that Boston Legal’s Denny Crane looks nothing like the old Kirk of “The Deadly Years.”

Cody — Before the opening credits of this episode, Kirk beams down to a planet and learns that his brother and his wife had both died of a mysterious illness. This is barely referenced at any point in the rest of the episode. Do you understand how bad that is?! There never been any indication at any point in the entire series up to this point that Kirk even had a brother. Suddenly he has one, who gets killed, to ??? effect. The rest of the plot is so forgettable that I don’t even remember what happens. I do know that Kirk’s nephew is introduced, but he spends the entire episode comatose in sick bay, and is never seen again in the rest of the series. I understand continuity wasn’t a strong point for TV shows back in the 60s, but this was egregious. At no point does Kirk care, or are we made to care, about anyone in his family. Missed opportunity.

Casey — Reactions in real time: “Wait Kirk has a brother?! Wait, now he doesn’t anymore?! Oh.” Then 56 minutes of silence.

Cody — This is the episode that never ends… and it goes on and on, my friends… this is the episode that never ends… and it goes on and on, my friends…

I’ll spare you from my overwhelming urge to copy and paste that 8 more times, and instead get down to it: this episode is just too long. The premise is interesting enough to keep you engaged: is Kirk’s memory flawed, or is the ship’s perfect computer system experiencing a problem? Even the finale is somewhat interesting. But most of the episode consists of a court cross-examining Kirk, then going to a commercial, then doing it again, ad nauseam until you would give pretty much anything to watch a few hours of Judge Judy.

I should note that after watching every episode of the show, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed that Star Trek: The Original Series did a good job of never really dragging. The show’s producers and writers did a remarkably good job of keeping each episode relatively interesting for full 50-minute spans… for the most part. But this episode failed where others succeeded. It might have worked as a 22-minute episode, but not as one this long. It was excruciating for Casey.

Casey — It was excruciating for me. And it had potential: a man versus technology dilemma; the officers all get to wear their medals and decorations and fancy dress uniforms (costumes are at least 38% of why one should watch the series); the viewers are given insight into the tedious lackluster bureaucracy of The Federation, thereby helping us to understand why Kirk loves his ship so much and also why so many young men of promise enlist as redshirts, doomed to be zapped away in some fuschia colored rock garden; an unusually sympathetic and smart female character guest stars as the lawyer; and who doesn’t love a good courtroom drama?

Yet few things are worse than a bad courtroom drama, and I mean a really undramatic courtroom drama, like for example a cross-examination that is essentially “Uh uh!” “Nuh uh!” repeated over and over again in various overlit courtrooms. Longest hour of 1967 and 2018.

Cody — Oh, did you want to watch Star Trek? I’m sorry, you’ve come to the wrong place. This is a generic 60s detective/cop drama. Seriously, you barely see anyone from the Enterprise in most of the episode. They introduce so many random characters and plotlines and sets that at one point I honestly had to check to make sure we weren’t watching Get Smart or Miami Vice. I distinctly remember about 20 minutes into the episode, I looked at Casey, threw up my arms, and asked “WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?” The plot involves time travel that goes mostly unexplained, and although the moral quandary in the episode is an interesting thought experiment in science fiction, it doesn’t justify an hour-long noir spy thriller that has basically nothing to do with Star Trek. Totally confusing. But it does get bonus points since one of the main characters has a cat named Isis. That made me laugh. (I’m a simple man. Don’t judge.)

Cody and Casey — Nothing about this episode makes ANY sense. Gideon is a utopian planet where nobody gets sick, and nobody seems to ever die in a germ-free world. The problem is that Gideon has become so overpopulated, there’s literally no space or privacy for anyone. We see entire shots of people packed into tight spaces just walking in circles aimlessly to illustrate this. And life is “sacred” to the people of Gideon, so they refuse to entertain the idea of using contraceptives or asking the Federation to help them develop programs to slow down their proliferation of life.

So how does the head of Gideon’s government deal with overpopulation? In the stupidest way ever conceived. He concocts a plan to abduct Captain Kirk, thus risking Gideon’s relationship with the Federation, to steal his blood because he’s a carrier for a virus he overcame in his youth. Then the head of the Gideon Council wants to inject his daughter with this virus so she can spread a plague around her planet, killing millions (or billions). Apparently condoms are bad, but the Black Death doesn’t raise any moral red flags. Also: why wouldn’t they just obtain a vial of germs from somewhere else, or just ASK Captain Kirk if they can have his blood, or find some other random sick person who might be willing to help them, or do literally anything other than kidnap a starship captain, to obtain the virus?

Here’s the other kicker: despite the planet being so overpopulated, the femme fatale of the episode has never been alone in a physical environment in her lifetime, Kirk is abducted and placed on an EMPTY replica of the USS Enterprise that exists on the planet’s surface. So this entire elaborate ruse to get his blood required a massive amount of space, on the surface of a world where vacant space pretty much doesn’t even exist. Every step of this episode is a logical contradiction. It’s like the writers each drafted a page and then passed it to the next person to continue. There is no continuity at all. It is a stupid plot. I will say that Spock has some hilarious lines making fun of politicians in this episode, but other than that, nothing makes a lick of sense.

Cody — “Court Martial” was an episode with never-ending court scenes, and “Plato’s Stepchildren” is an episode with never-ending torture scenes. It’s basically Kirk and company getting shock collared and abused for an hour. It’s a hard episode to watch, because it’s basically just an hour of seeing characters you’ve grown to love humiliate themselves and suffer with no recourse, and it’s just not fun at all.

Now, I should note that this is the episode that many claim to include the first interracial kiss on broadcast television, which sounds great on paper as a progressive moment in TV history. But this was actually the first kiss between a fictional white male and a fictional black female to air on American network television. You can read into the history of the kiss if you want, but long story short, the historical import of this “television moment” is greatly exaggerated. Even if you wanted to believe this was the first televised interracial kiss, though, you’ll be disappointed, because the bad guys in this episode force Kirk and Uhura to kiss against their will, the camera angle is obscured significantly so you can’t really see anything, and the camera CERTAINLY doesn’t linger on the moment. I’d been looking forward to seeing this “historic” TV moment when we started watching the series, but ultimately, it was nothing to write home about, unfortunately. I’m still glad they DID IT, obviously, but don’t get too excited if you decide to see it for yourself, because it’s not as magical as you might have thought. Far from the bold, brave statement you may have been led to believe.

Casey — According to Wikipedia, the BBC did not originally air this episode on the grounds that there was too much torture and sadism in it. Even for the BBC.

It is definitely the most sadistic society the series portrays. The ancient Greek-ish denizens of the unnamed planet are tall, thin, blond, blue-eyed, so intelligent they can move things with their minds, virtually immortal, and have no empathy whatsoever. They are also quite bored—the downside to immortality, I guess. And despite their great mental prowess, they can come up with nothing better to do with their time than torture smaller and weaker beings, usually in the form of cruel little games and spectacles. Within this framework, forcing Kirk and Uhura to kiss as part of one of their malicious little after-dinner spectacles hardly represents any sort of progressive moment in the history of TV; on the contrary, in this context, the interracial kiss is made to appear as some sort of horrific crime against human nature. Both Kirk and Uhura are unwilling to do it. They suffer doing it. Their interracial kiss is framed as a kind of mutual sexual abuse. Really twisted.

Also, is the idea that intelligence and kindness are inversely proportional a sci-fi trope? Or a post-WWII legacy thing? Or what? Because something similar appears, for example, in the movie Gattaca, which also imagines a future of perfected or ideal humans with every quality but empathy and kindness, and whose genetic superiority narrowly ascribes to an obviously Aryan standard of beauty and comportment that is basically nazi in that it rationalizes, on economic, cultural, and “scientific” grounds, the systematic exclusion or mistreatment of “aberrant” beings.

Honestly, this episode isn’t really that bad, or at least, it isn’t bad in the same way that “Catspaw” or “The Mark of Gideon” are bad. It is a little hard to watch, but it is coherent. It raises some interesting points. They travel back in time, kind of. The problem with it is that its flatlined narrative just shows us the twisted logic of a dystopian place like this, over and over, but has no response or profound critique or solution beyond “maybe someone will kill the king and then let’s get the F$%& back to the ship.”

Cody — Here’s what I wrote as my note for this episode: “Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan walk into a bar.” It’s pretty much true. You know how Super Smash Bros. is a super-popular video game franchise, because you get to see popular characters from various unrelated properties you know and love fight each other to see who would win? You know how all the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are insanely popular because they’re constantly crossing over, and The Avengers are always fun to watch because you get to see different superheroes interact? Now imagine that happened in Star Trek, only instead of seeing characters you know or have ever heard of, you “get to see” Kirk and Spock teleported onto a planet along with Abraham Lincoln and a geriatric Vulcan you’ve never heard of so they can fight in a 4-on-4 battle against Genghis Khan, a disgraced Starfleet captain you’ve never heard of, a woman who gets zero lines in the entire episode, and Kahless, the savage father of the Klingon empire who inexplicably takes orders from the Starfleet captain. Why Abraham Lincoln? Why any of this? Why is this happening? What drugs were the writers doing when they came up with this? WHY??

Casey — The only thing more surprising than looking out the window (or whatever it is) of the Enterprise and seeing a giant image of Abraham Lincoln floating in the middle of outer space is looking at this episode’s page on IMDB and learning that it has a 6.8/10. If that does not convey the deeply arbitrary status of aggregate review scores, I don’t know what will.

Unless, that is, we are talking about Cody’s award-winning podcast, Curiosity Daily, which currently has more than 250 five-star reviews on iTunes. Hot.

Cody — Kids make masturbatory hand gestures and then cry about their dead parents. It’s just annoying. There are a handful of episodes that attempt to feature children as the centerpiece of the plot, which I feel like was kind of a “thing” television shows did in the 60s and 70s, perhaps to attract a wider audience of 9-year-olds for some reason. In virtually every attempt at this strange child-pandering approach, Star Trek performed very poorly, but this episode was probably the worst offender. There seriously is nothing to say other than the first sentence of this paragraph, preferably followed by a stiff drink. I suggest whatever Scotty found in his quarters that one time.

Casey — This episode reminds us, along with most horror movies and occasionally Butters from South Park, that few things are creepier than a creepy child. Perhaps its major contribution to TV history is that there is literally no difference between watching this episode and watching a gif of a child lurking in a corner and making masturbatory gestures.

]]>https://codygough.com/2018/10/29/10-worst-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/feed/1black-cat-from-catspawcodygough10 Most Entertaining Episodes of Star Trek: The Original Serieshttps://codygough.com/2018/09/04/10-most-entertaining-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/
https://codygough.com/2018/09/04/10-most-entertaining-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/#commentsTue, 04 Sep 2018 16:25:24 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1695Welcome to the first list in a 4-item list of lists that my wife and I are writing as a cultural output resulting from the cultural input of watching every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. This, our first list, will be the most banal list, but will still serve as an exceptional point of entry into the show in the event that you haven’t watched it and need to know what’s worth seeing.

The best science fiction is thought-provoking, so in a few weeks, I’ll be posting a list of the most thought-provoking episodes of the show. But this is not that list. While some of these episodes may intrigue you, they were selected for their sheer entertainment value, and not necessarily for their insightfulness or ability to intellectually stimulate their audience. If you’re looking for episodes you can watch for pure enjoyment and share with someone who couldn’t care less about science fiction, then this is the list of episodes for you.

Quick note: you might notice that The Trouble with Tribbles (Season 2, Episode 15) is not on this list, despite being a great episode. I suspect this episode didn’t leap to mind when we were brainstorming our favorite episodes not because it’s undeserving of our accolades, but because it’s the first episode of the show Casey ever watched, so when we last saw it, we hadn’t yet developed parasocial relationships with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. This is kind of ironic, since tribbles were the catalyst to get us to watch the show in the first place, but here we are. I just wanted to point this out before we get into the list. That said, here we go!

Cody — It’s just so good. Aliens take over the Enterprise for like, the hundredth time, and the everyone in the crew is turned into rocks… other than Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty. They learn the aliens have weak senses and emotions, basically meaning they’re bad at being humans. Each crew member then does the most HILARIOUSLY CHARACTER-APPROPRIATE THING POSSIBLE to give the aliens “sensory overload.” Think of the most generic, caricature-like way each crew member could do this, and there’s your episode. Kirk literally seduces one of them. Spock demonstrates supreme logic in a game of 3-D Chess. McCoy does something forgettable, because he’s annoying. And Scotty… oh, Scotty. I have so much to say about Scotty. But Scotty gets the alien drunk. They polish off a bottle of Saurian brandy. It’s the most Scotty thing that has ever happened on the show, and possibly my favorite moment from the entire series. Nothing beats Scotty out-drinking an alien. Nothing.

Casey — One of the great themes of Star Trek is the role of humanity in a totally technologized, computerized environment. Sure, human error is a thing. Hysterical behavior, after all, poses a lot of danger when zipping through the uncharted depths of space at Warp 9. Spock is better than McCoy. These are all facts. Yet our humanity, Star Trek insists, is a greater asset to us than our technology. It will get us out of a pickle when all those nifty handheld gadgets are rendered useless or taken away from us by Superior Life Forms. Of which, it turns out, there are many.

Now, the celebration of an idyllic, abstract and frankly naif humanity might sounds like the kind of “argument” that McCoy likes to spitefully throw in Spock’s “pointy-eared” face. This episode is great because it makes a case for our humanity without idealizing it, instead playing up the simple or absurd side of what it means to be a human–awkward pubescent flirtations, winning a board game, outdrinking someone. The crew’s understanding of their own human foibles allows them to defeat their opponents. And as a narrative the episode is super fun to watch because it resolves the conflict by appealing to the distinct personalities of the main cast. Scotty’s wide-eyed astonishment at the alien’s alcohol tolerance, his agony, his reluctance, and finally his noble sacrifice of his best bottle of Scotch are silly, but they are also just so very Scotty. As Jorge Luis Borges has observed, a great storyteller knows how to make a single moment the cypher of an entire life. In no other episode are Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty (especially Scotty) more fully themselves.

Cody — Apparently Vulcans find themselves “in heat” once in a while, and they have to have sex or die. The opening episode of the show’s second season puts Spock in some serious heat, and you get to see a Vulcan mating ritual. At some point during this, Kirk actually has to fight Spock, which honestly makes pretty much no sense, but the episode somehow makes it work because McCoy actually does something cool for possibly the only time ever at the battle. Spock also delivers a sick burn to his Vulcan bro-bro who steals his would-be mistress: “you’ll find that often, having is not as pleasing as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.” DAAAAYUM

Casey — This episode, which should have been called “Mate or Die,” addresses a very important question, viz.: Where do baby Vulcans come from? That is to say, given that sex is Nature’s way of tricking us into the uncomfortable and expensive task of bearing, birthing and raising children, how (and why) would totally rational humanoids with no desires or impulses ever end up procreating?

The fact that it even touches on these issues, and that they go to Vulcan, makes this episode one of the most enjoyable to watch. However, as Cody points out, they play fast and lose with narrative coherence. For example, if Vulcans only feel sexual desire during these preordained regulated cycles of lust, why does Spock’s chosen mate T’Pring already have a man picked out? Is everyone on the same lust cycle or do they occur individually and randomly? And how is it that Spock can substitute the would-be mating act, supposedly necessary to his life and moreover only available to him like once a decade, with a sword fight with Kirk (who in turn gets an injection from McCoy)? What does that say about their relationship?

I also very much enjoyed that the title of supreme leader of Vulcan, the Universe’s Most Rational Civilization, is held by the imposing matriarch T’Pau. She is “the only person to turn down a seat at the Federation Council” and thus anti-establishment and thus cool. Kirk’s admiration for her reifies his Maverick status and sets him apart from the soldier follows orders, which is another important element of this episode since he is disobeying orders by going to Vulcan at all. There is lots to say about gender and sexuality in Star Trek, but basically, as a 60s TV show, it tends to reflect contemporary anxieties about changing gender roles by idealizing the female sex slave, casting the working woman as an irrational nuisance unless her job is to tend to the immediate needs of a man, or, Yoko Ono style, as a threat to the camaraderie of the band of brothers. T’Pau is a refreshing exception.

Cody — What would happen if, at the height of the Roman Empire, television had been around? This is that episode. You get a mashup of gladiatorial combat and reality television, and it’s done ridiculously well. This episode could go into our list of top thought-provoking episodes because it’s such a cool concept. But just watching the fight scenes is fun. And THE ENDING. OMG THE ENDING. Let’s just say the planet finds salvation by finding Jesus. I’m not even kidding. It comes basically out of nowhere, and in the form of one of Uhura’s four-ish relevant lines of dialogue in the entire series. Apparently monotheism was pretty popular in the 1960s. Thanks, television history!

Casey — They don’t worship the Sun…they worship the Son! Get it?

If you don’t, don’t feel bad, because only Lt. Uhura did.

Even though this episode opens and closes with the idea that religions evolve through a complex process of puns, the story somehow works. By allowing television and Ancient Rome to coexist, it asks the viewer to reflect on the idea of uneven modernizations — a reality in many parts of our world — as well as on our Society of the Spectacle.

Or the viewer can disregard all of that and just enjoy Spock and Co. resolving everything while Kirk passes the last night before his execution with his ideal woman, a platinum blonde submissive — “This evening I was told I was your slave. Command me” — because these are Kirk’s problems and also because sword fights aren’t the only kinds of fantasies people like to live through the screen now that they’re not quite so acceptable in real life.

I for one enjoy anything that suggests parallels between the U.S. and the late Roman Empire, whether it be overstepping its boundaries, corruption through the lavish excesses of the upper classes, the rise of insane leaders, a politics based entirely upon spectacle, or American Gladiators.

Cody — This might be Casey’s favorite episode. You meet Spock’s parents. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? On top of that, the episode is basically a murder mystery dinner, only with ridiculously stupid looking aliens and Vulcans saying funny things with a humor that’s so dry, you think you’ve wandered into the Sahara Desert with cottonmouth from a hangover. The last scene in the episode is literally a room full of men guffawing about how women are illogical, so if that’s not your jam, then you might want to cut out early. But otherwise it’s all-around gold.

Casey — This is absolutely my favorite episode. Spock’s Vulcan father, his human mother, their relationship with their son Spock, and their relationship with each other unfold and develop against a background of a Psychedelic Agatha Christie whodunit populated by high maintenance foreign officials that vaguely resemble Teletubbies. So many great 1960s alien costumes. So many.

The episode also features one of the series’s more subtle and artfully crafted character scenes: Spock and McCoy await in full dress uniform to receive the Vulcan Ambassador. McCoy tries the Vulcan hand salute thing and of course he can’t do it and so he bitches about it. Meanwhile Kirk strides ahead and greets the ambassador as he descends from the space pod thing and of course he (Kirk) is super cordial and smooth and adept at playing the diplomat and he doesn’t even try the Vulcan hand salute, so we don’t know whether or not he can do it and he probably can’t and that’s probably why he didn’t but he still pulls off a regular greeting without being rude because he is suave and charming and cordial but not a sycophant; because, in short, he is Kirk. The Vulcan Ambassador ignores Spock. He introduces “She who is my wife,” a smiley human wearing a bonnet. The Ambassador asks to be escorted to his quarters by someone who is not Spock. Kirk and McCoy are taken aback. They are perplexed. Nonplussed. Kirk then asks if Spock wants to go down to Vulcan to visit his parents. And Spock informs that the Ambassador and his wife are his parents!

Will Spock’s family ever be reconciled? Will the killer be found and brought to justice? What is it like for a human woman being married to an emotionless Vulcan man? Find out the easy way by watching this episode.

Cody — I like this episode because it sets up one of the most interesting recurring character interactions in the series. This is one of those “everyone in the cast goes crazy” episodes that you find in other TV shows (or at least in the follow-up episode The Naked Now from Star Trek: The Next Generation), but in this one, Nurse Chapel tells Spock that she has feelings for him. And amazingly, this is referenced in future episodes. Not normal for the series. Kirk literally finds out his brother died in the opening scene of another episode, and it’s never mentioned again, including at any other point IN THAT EPISODE. Continuity is not a strong point of the series. So aside from seeing everybody basically drunk and getting to watch Sulu swashbuckling with a sword, it’s actually an episode that kind of “matters” in the series, which is cool.

Casey — This is one of Star Trek’s many forays into the realm of the crew’s unconscious. For the show’s main cast, breaking character is part of playing the character. Episodes like this shed light on all the naughty desires that seethe beneath those chartreuse, ruby and baby blue uniforms. Star Trek is no Hitchcock film, but for a TV show it is very good at delivering an action-packed narrative while also tapping into the murkier dimensions of the human psyche. I think this is part of what makes this show still so watchable and enjoyable today: sure, they are wholesome characters, their integrity and loyalty to their mission is unquestionable, but because you get regular enough glimpses of all their repressed fantasies, they manage to stay believable, or at least sympathetic.

Cody — Overall, after watching this series, I was a little disappointed in how few clever or interesting ways the crew came up with to get out of trouble/danger. A lot of times they would do something generic like shoot a phaser at something, or aliens would do something inexplicable and you’d just kind of shrug and go “okay, cool, I guess they didn’t blow up after all?” or something. In this episode, however, Kirk does something cool to outsmart the aliens. I found that satisfying enough. But then. THEN. THEN you see the alien. They beam over, and oh my God. What is happening. Surrealism goes from zero to sixty in about three seconds. The ending is super weird and super unexpected and you’re just like “SOMEONE PASS ME MY VAPE PEN” or whatever so you can rewind the episode 15 minutes and watch it again. My notes on this episode read “Sultan baby, good tactics.” Enough said.

Cody — You know how I said there weren’t enough clever tricks in this series? This episode has another one. Kirk explaining Fizzbin is one of the best scenes in the series. But I should probably back up and explain that the entire premise of the episode is that Kirk and Spock land on a planet with a super advanced race of aliens who somehow decide to copy every aspect of 1920s gangster culture. Casey had a running theory that Star Trek was so low budget when they shot it, the premise of most of the episodes was determined entirely by which TV set was “next door” that they could use for an episode. Apparently in this case, Star Trek was shooting next door to a gangster movie, so here we are. There are some BAD accents in this. I live in Chicago, and I’ve heard some bad/unrealistic Chicago accents, but this was brutal. That made it all the more entertaining, though. It’s just stupid entertainment, but definitely good enough to be enjoyable.

Casey — Just when you start to suspect that Captain James T. Kirk is an oily womanizer whose primary function is to constantly be rescued by his crew, this episode reminds you why Kirk is (as Cody tells me) TV’s most iconic hero.

If Star Trek is something of an Odyssey story — a ship sailing from island to island, confronting monsters and perils of a natural and supernatural order — then nowhere does Kirk show himself more of a “deep, devious, subtle, and many-sided Odysseus” (Homer’s adjectives, not mine) than he does in the Fizzbin scene. Even Spock barely keeps up, though his dry bemusement at the Captain’s lies — something Vulcans can’t do — contributes significantly to the scene’s comic effect. The Fizzbin scene is to Kirk what the Cyclops chapter is to Odysseus.

Cody — We’re not sure if this was a 1960s thing or a Star Trek trope, but a lot of episodes in the original series express some sort of anxiety about evil twins or evil doubles or alternate parallel versions of ourselves. Maybe it was some Cold War thing, or maybe not. But this was the most entertaining episode to actually watch play out. You get an evil but still totally logical Spock, and you get a believable romance with Kirk for possibly the only time ever, and it all just really works. Good Enterprise, meet evil Enterprise, and you’re off to the races. Nothing particularly insightful to say about it other than that it’s much better done than a lot of the other episodes that play with a duality theme.

Casey — The trope of the double, whether as replica, mirror image, or evil twin, taps into a lot of fears and goes way, way back: rivals must be roughly equal or there is no rivalry. In a lot of Romantic literature (Poe, Hoffman, early Dostoevsky, etc.), seeing your own double is never a good thing. In fact it usually means you are going to die. More generally, fakes and forgeries — the double that hides or supplants the authentic original — express our concern about being tricked, mislead or manipulated. I imagine that during the Cold War era in which the series first aired, propaganda images of a Communist Double of America with communist versions of everything and everyone you knew put a pretty scary spin on the double trope for a lot of people.

However, in this episode, the Double is more of an Exotic Other. It is Orientalized, in the Edward Said sense of the term, expressing a centuries-old colonialist “We the Civilized West” versus “Them the Barbaric Far East” thing. Perhaps Star Trek gravitates more to those kinds of cultural fantasies than it does to Cold War fears because they are more comfortable. They are certainly more erotic: the “Captain’s Woman,” whom I would consider the prettiest actress ever to appear on Star Trek, is straight out of an Arabian Nights harem, and other-Uhura’s belly-baring belly-dancer red uniform sure out sexifies Red Army uniforms and icons of Lenin and Stalin.

On a narrative level, this episode is interesting because it shows you what an evil Kirk or Spock would be like and they’re actually not that different; they’re just evil. This means that goodness is not their characters’ defining trait, it means they have qualities that transcend the rather flat categories of good versus evil , and so basically, once again, it speaks again to the particularity of these characters. They can be so many alternative versions of themselves and yet still, somehow, in each variant they are still so totally them.

Cody — This is higher on my list than it is on Casey’s list, possibly in part because I really bought into the Spock romance angle. Something about this episode just kinda worked for me, though. On an alien world, Spock and McCoy are hurled back in time to an ice age, and Kirk is pitched back to the middle of some weird religious inquisition. The intriguing and entertaining part is definitely all Spock here, even if the premise literally makes zero sense (he “de-evolves” to a primitive Vulcan because of the time period they arrive in, which is stupid and, dare I say, illogical). But his romance is well-written and well-directed (and well-performed, obviously). This isn’t a magical episode of television by any means, but I was into it.

In this episode, Borges’s “Library of Babel” meets time travel meets state-sponsored terror meets leather bikinis. Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrive to planet that is about to be engulfed by a supernova. The planet has a library which contains a vast archive of videos that are actually portals to the past. The archive is cared for by a single, aged, homicidal librarian and his identical replicas, all of whom are remarkably strong and agile and homicidal for their age. Much as contemporaneous dictatorships were doing, this librarian has made certain people “disappear,” not by killing them and hiding their bodies but by exiling them to remote place in time from which they can never return.

Cody — Full disclosure: we added this to our list of best episodes before we’d even seen it. I mean, Harry Mudd is a fun character. His first appearance is entertaining but pretty generic, but this one is so over the top, you can’t help but enjoy it even more. Mudd’s personal hell is — are you ready for some progressive television? — his nagging wife, so of course that’s a recurring theme in the episode. The rest of the episode plays with notions of utopia, which is another very common theme in the series. What I like about this approach, though, is that it delves into reactance, which I think isn’t explored nearly enough as it should be. Not to mention this episode includes the unforgettably amazing scene where the senior officers of the Enterprise basically do bad improv to confuse robots. Yes, that’s as awesome as it sounds.

Casey — There could be a whole separate category devoted to Star Trek episodes about replicas. In this one, Mudd somehow becomes the leader/captive of an extremely intelligent (?) Android race and immediately proceeds to commission a series of Barbie Doll replicas whose function is to pour him wine in the pink cave that serves him as a throne room and that includes an aquarium for the replica or taxidermied body (?) of his wife, whom he now can turn on and off at will, to his infinite delight.

All of this is but an elaborate and ultimately unnecessary frame for the Enterprise crew’s victory via some impromptu Theatre of the Absurd, suggesting that avant-garde art is capable of dethroning tyrants, baffling technocrats, short-circuiting basic bitches, and dismantling an oppressive hegemonic system. This is my fantasy too, Star Trek. This is my fantasy too.

]]>https://codygough.com/2018/09/04/10-most-entertaining-episodes-of-star-trek-the-original-series/feed/2star-trick-photo-credit-brett-jordan-via-flickr-attribution-2-generic-cc-by-2-0-licensecodygoughI just watched every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, and there’s a lot to sayhttps://codygough.com/2018/08/28/i-just-watched-every-episode-of-star-trek-the-original-series-and-theres-a-lot-to-say-cody-gough/
https://codygough.com/2018/08/28/i-just-watched-every-episode-of-star-trek-the-original-series-and-theres-a-lot-to-say-cody-gough/#commentsTue, 28 Aug 2018 12:30:32 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=1678About 9 months ago, my wife and I started watching Star Trek on Netflix. As in, the ORIGINAL Star Trek. The Kirk and Spock one. Known as “TOS” for “The Original Series,” at least among circles of people who spend their time defining acronyms to help them more clearly talk about TV shows, this show is in the cultural fabric of America. Kirk and Spock are two of the most iconic characters in television history (source: my opinion).

But have you ever gone back and actually watched it?

I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I proudly picked up my first edition copy of the Star Trek Encyclopedia — a physical copy, before e-books were a thing — when I was in second grade. I also dabbled in Deep Space 9, Voyager, and even Enterprise over the years. Yet TOS was never part of my repertoire.

So I decided, after more than a decade of mostly Star Trek-free living, that it was time to see what Kirk and Spock had done to become such important reference points for people around the world. And by “I decided,” I mean “tribbles were literally thrown at us during a toast at our wedding reception, and I figured I should probably show Casey ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’ so she knows WTF had happened on our wedding day.”

In true Cody and Casey fashion, I showed her one episode, thinking “this will give her an idea of what this show is like,” and was then surprised by a response of “this is amazing and we are watching another episode right now.” This has happened with a bizarre lineup of shows, including but not limited to Game of Thrones, Akibaranger (a Japanese parody of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, effectively… you can imagine my surprise), and now Star Trek.

About halfway through the series, which we were watching for actual entertainment value more than to get a sense of having completed something, Casey proposed that we make a Top 10 and Bottom 10 episodes list. I vaguely kept this in mind as we watched, but really, we weren’t viewing the show as a means to an end. And I think that’s an important distinction to make. So many people these days literally only consume something or come up with ideas so they can “generate content” or whatever garbage buzzword is popular that day. But we embarked on this journey for ourselves, and only occasionally noted along the way that “this might be a top/bottom episode.” So that’s how we got here.

We wrapped up the series by watching the pilot episode, “The Cage,” which seemed to me like a good way to end. Might as well look at what could have been, right? Then I made some coffee, Casey made some yerba mate, and we sat down to review the descriptions and Netflix thumbnails of each episode in order to make our lists of the best and worst episodes.

The “best episodes” list was 26 episodes long. Basically a third of the series.

So we did some refining. What did “best” mean, exactly? Most entertaining? Most thought-provoking? We quickly found we could easily split these into two separate lists. We also started an entirely separate list that I expertly called “interesting but something f***ing weird happens and it’s like, what do I even do with this?” Once you see that list, you’ll understand why it exists. Like, what do you do when an episode provokes thought about utopian ideals, but you’re cringing throughout the entire episode because Dr. McCoy uses this bizarre southern accent for some reason and a woman from the crew becomes a damsel in distress who gets dressed up like a princess? And that’s the mildest example on the list.

We ended up with FOUR lists, which contain more than half the episodes in the series. But I think they’re good lists. We’ll be posting one of these four Top 10 lists every week for the next 4 weeks.

First will be the Top 10 Most Entertaining Episodes. This is the best place to start because it gets the fun stuff out of the way, not to mention there are probably literally like 80 million lists exactly like this from other people, so at this point it’s pretty tired out. I’m too lazy to do a Google search to confirm any of what I just said, so deal with it. When we say “entertaining” we just mean “fun to watch.” These episodes are not necessarily deep or thought-provoking.

Then we’ll drop straight to the Top 10 Worst Episodes. These are just un-watchably bad. Avoid them at all costs.

At that point, we’ll head over to the Top 10 episodes with good or interesting ideas that ultimately do something so weird, we can’t exactly recommend them in good conscience. The intro to that list is going to be detailed and hilarious, so just trust me when I tell you to look forward to that one. And no, I am not going to initial-cap the stupid title of this list. I’m already over it.

We’ll wrap up with the Top 10 Thought-Provoking Episodes of the show, and this is where being married to someone with a PhD in Comparative Literature is REALLY going to show through. Just kidding, it’s going to show through in every list. But I think/hope this one will be the most useful for true fans of science fiction as a genre of possibilities, and not just a pew pew laser beam fest of mindless entertainment.

We’ll wrap up with a final week discussing some of our thoughts on important elements of the series, like how awesome Scotty is, how Russian Chekov is, and how we feel about Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (spoiler alert: it’s strongly). We’ll also explain why Spock is basically the best character in television history and delve into some of the mystery of William Shatner, who I see on Twitter and who Casey has seen on Boston Legal, which means we have two very different reference points for the legendary eclectic actor. My biggest regret is that we didn’t take notes on the outrageous outfits worn by the lead ladies in each episode, if for no other reason than because Casey actually liked some of them, and I need reference material for Halloween costumes.

Oh, and once all is said and done, we may have a special post on the Star Trek movies, as well. As of right now, Casey has only seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and I haven’t seen most of the other films in many years. Hopefully that’ll be a treat.

So there’s your preview! Look for upcoming lists in the coming weeks. I’ll update this post with links to all upcoming posts I referenced, as they become available. Until then: live long and prosper! Mostly because you can’t click on my links if you’re DEAD. HA HA

I play nerdy college student Ray, one member of an ensemble cast of characters trying to navigate their way through college. Did I mention that I play a college student? Ha ha yeah, I’m awesome that way.

This series started as a successful Kickstarter project and grew into a huge part of my life in the latter half of 2013 and early 2014. I’ve become close friends with many members of the cast, and I can honestly say that the people both on- and off-camera are some of the most talented people I’ve worked with… and they’re so young (most are actually Columbia College Chicago students)! It was a blast to shoot the first season of the series, and I’m pumped about the possibility of having a second season. But we’ll see.

In the mean time, enjoy the episodes on this playlist, and please subscribe to the series’ YouTube channel to stay up-to-date on future content!

When you email various co-workers and ask them to “spread the word” about the company’s Harlem Shake video, it doesn’t always result in 50 or so people showing up like you would like/expect… instead, you end up with this video!

I’m glad people showed up. I’m kinda sad I had to direct and run the camera, so I’m only in half of it. But that kind of adds to the charm. Anyway, I’ll be posting more frequently starting this weekend, so hopefully this video will hold you over until then. Enjoy!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/14/directing-a-harlem-shake-video/feed/0codygoughThe Super Bowl: Raiders and Buccaneers vs. 49ers and Ravenshttps://codygough.com/2013/02/03/the-super-bowl-raiders-and-buccaneers-vs-49ers-and-ravens/
https://codygough.com/2013/02/03/the-super-bowl-raiders-and-buccaneers-vs-49ers-and-ravens/#respondSun, 03 Feb 2013 18:15:01 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=604I’m not excited about Super Bowl XLVII. I don’t really follow football other than watching the Packers play, and I usually watch all the best Super Bowl commercials online before they air.

Apparently, I wasn’t really interested in the Super Bowl ten years ago, either. The following is a printed out page from my web site, featuring a post that I wrote on January 27, 2003 – the day after Super Bowl XXXVII. I printed out this page and turned it in to my creative writing teacher, since we were required to write outside of class.

it appears that my teacher only had one comment, and that was to underline a phrase that I wrote that was not politically correct. I hope I don’t offend anyone with it, but frankly, I didn’t remember the name of the guy I referenced, so I wrote what I wrote. But I do think he’s awesome and rocks as a commentator. More or less politically incorrect in 2013? I don’t know. Just please try not to freak out: remember, I wrote this when I was 17.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on Super Bowl XXXVII (expletives deleted, for the most part):

I apologize for the political incorrectness of the underlined phrase… but I really DO like that one African-American NFL commentator, he’s awesome!

A few things:

“Buccaneers” and “Raiders” ARE both rejected versions of the word “Pirate.” I bet that would be all over the Internet if it happened today.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t so bad these days. No more hate!

I still don’t like anti-drug commercials, but at least they’re less patronizing than they were ten years ago.

I’d never heard of Sting prior to this Super Bowl. After seeing the halftime show, I wish I had still never heard of him.

It’s funny that my teacher took exception to calling that one African-American commentator “that black guy” but she had no problem with me calling Terry Bradshaw “that pissed off old redneck.” Also, what is that guy’s name?!

“It made me miss Independence Day on FOX” is one of my favorite lines I have ever written.

To this day, I STILL think it’s incredibly bizarre that the Patriots won the first Super Bowl after 9/11.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip down Super Bowl lane! I frankly don’t care who wins today, and I’ll be doing a radio show during the game anyway. Maybe I’ll watch next year.

—–
This post is part of Cody’s “10-Year Idea Reunion” series, in which Cody revisits his creative writing class assignments exactly 10 years after writing them. Learn more about Cody’s Idea Reunion and follow him on WordPress to follow along!

]]>https://codygough.com/2013/02/03/the-super-bowl-raiders-and-buccaneers-vs-49ers-and-ravens/feed/0codygoughI apologize for the political incorrectness of the underlined phrase... but I really DO like that one African-American NFL commentator, he's awesome!Explaining song lyrics you never understoodhttps://codygough.com/2013/01/13/cody-admits-he-listens-to-video-game-music/
https://codygough.com/2013/01/13/cody-admits-he-listens-to-video-game-music/#respondMon, 14 Jan 2013 05:21:03 +0000http://codygough.com/2013/01/13/457/WGN Radio - 720 AM: [audio http://tribwgnam.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/130113-misheard-song-lyrics.mp3%5D Brian explains the meanings of obscure references in classic songs, including “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon, “The Joker” by The Steve Miller Band, “Down Under” by Men At Work, “Surfin’ USA” by The Beach Boys, “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, “Hotel California” by The Eagles,…]]>

In this podcast, I admit to the world that the first CDs I ever bought were video game soundtracks. Oh, me.

Brian explains the meanings of obscure references in classic songs, including “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon, “The Joker” by The Steve Miller Band, “Down Under” by Men At Work, “Surfin’ USA” by The Beach Boys, “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley, “Hotel California” by The Eagles, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. He also probes his producer Cody Gough about his love for video game music.

]]>https://codygough.com/2012/12/31/brian-noonan-out-of-context-quotes-on-wgn-radio/feed/0codygoughHoliday Shopping False Advertisinghttps://codygough.com/2012/12/20/holiday-shopping-false-advertising/
https://codygough.com/2012/12/20/holiday-shopping-false-advertising/#commentsThu, 20 Dec 2012 21:16:03 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=120Need a last-minute stocking stuffer? How about you buy a 40″ LED TV? AND PUT IT IN A STOCKING:

Seriously… it’s like advertisers don’t even care anymore. Soon, communication is going to deteriorate into just using buzzwords all the time. Now excuse me while I blog my app to curate something viral on social media… Google.

]]>https://codygough.com/2012/12/20/holiday-shopping-false-advertising/feed/1codygoughHoliday Shopping False AdvertisingHow to prevent Instagram from selling your photoshttps://codygough.com/2012/12/18/how-to-prevent-instagram-from-selling-your-photos/
https://codygough.com/2012/12/18/how-to-prevent-instagram-from-selling-your-photos/#commentsTue, 18 Dec 2012 18:02:21 +0000http://codygough.com/?p=113Hey everyone freaking out about Instagram being able to sell your photos: just download an app that adds a watermark to your photos. Photos with watermarks will be completely useless to Instagram and thus will not be sold. Problem solved.

I have heard this blurb from the Rockford Register Star cited more than any other newspaper article in my entire life, very likely due to the fact that most of my friends are trolls and wanted to rub the XFL’s failure in my face. Clearly, though, I wasn’t that much of a fan, or I wouldn’t have kept the article, right? Hah! Who’s laughing now?!!